Jaume Solà i Pujols - Departament de Filologia Catalana ...

(6) a. Un roc ha caigut
A stone has fallen
'One (of the) stone(s) fell'
(not just: 'A stone fell')
b. Un cotxe ha passat
A car has gone-by
'One (of the) car(s) went by'
(not just: 'A car went by')
There seem to be other factors favoring neutral (i.e., 'What's happening?'-appropriate)
dislocation or preverbal subjecthood: there is a gradation agent-dative-object-oblique going from
most to least favoring. This favoring gradation is specially apparent with 'inverted' psych-verbs
(It. piacere, 'to like' see Belletti & Rizzi (1988)), which most often have the Dative or Accusative
Experiencer Argument as CLLD and the subject Theme as an I-subject. I will not pursue the
issue. Suffice it to be the case that no criterion singles out, as far as we have seen, preverbal
subjects as opposed to CLLD elements in a clear-cut way: both subjects and CLLD datives or
objects have the same favoring conditions for (non-Focus-fronted) preverbal position, even if one
of the favoring conditions is possibly being an external Argument (then a subject).
There is a more solid criterion that has become a classical test for subjecthood as opposed
to dislocation: only true subjects can be quantified. I think this criterion can be a good test. But I
think too that it has many times been oversimplified. It is not enough to come up with a few
examples (such as 0) and conclude they are genuine cases of true subjects. On the empirical side,
it may happen (and it does happen) that not all quantifiers behave alike. On the theoretical side,
we know there are various kinds of quantifiers: apart from 'true' quantifiers, researchers have
proposed subclasses such as D-linked quantifiers (Pesetsky (1982)), branching quantifiers (May
(1985), Hornstein (1984)), indefinite DPs with a referential reading (Fodor & Sag (1982)), etc. I
will not address the issue of a proper classification (these classes are not complementary), but
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